And Now for Some Real Heretics, Part 1
In their book, Jesus and the Lost Goddess, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy have offered a simple, easy-to-understand schema for understanding Gnosticism. All religious traditions have Gnostic movements within them, so before looking at Christian Gnosticism, let us use Freke and Gandy’s opposition between Gnosticism and Literalism to get a handle on Gnosticism in general and, in particular, why Gnostics often end up being persecuted as heretics.
According the Freke and Gandy, “Gnostics are concerned with the inner essence of their tradition. Literalists associate their faith with its outward manifestations: sacred symbols, scriptures, rituals, ecclesiastical leaders, and so on. Gnostics see themselves as being on a spiritual journey of personal transformation. Literalists see themselves as fulfilling a divinely ordained obligation to practise particular religious customs as a part of their national or cultural identity.” (p.2) In addition,
Gnostics wish to free themselves from the limitations of their personal and cultural identities and experience the oneness of all things. They therefore have no reluctance in adopting the wisdom of other traditions if it adds something to their own. Literalists use religion to sustain their personal and cultural identity by defining themselves in opposition to others. This inevitably leads to disputes with those outside their particular cult. It is literalists who fight wars of religion with Literalists from other traditions, each claiming that God is on their side. Literalists’ enmity also extends to Gnostics within their own tradition who question their own bigotry. Most
spiritual traditions have a tragic history of the brutal suppression of Gnostics by intolerant Literalists. Interestingly, it is never the other way around. (p. 2)
We are all pretty familiar with Literalism. What do Gnostics “believe?”
At the heart of the perennial philosophy of Gnosticism is a simple but powerful idea… It is the idea of God as a Big Mind which contains the cosmos and which is becoming conscious of itself through all conscious beings within the cosmos. The purpose of Gnostic initiation is to awaken in us a recognition of this our shared divine essence. (p. 19)
Gnostics of many traditions introduced a threefold division of the cosmos and of the self into what we can call, using the Greek of the Christian and Pagan Gnostics, pneuma, psyche, and physis. These terms are usually translated as spirit, soul and matter. St. Paul in his epistles made use of those terms to divide people into pneumatics, psychics and hylics, hyle being matter. Unlike scientific materialism, in which matter is the only reality, for the Gnostics, matter is the least “real” of all three.
The modern conception of human identity, articulated by scientific materialism, is that we are a complex physical organism which, in some way we have yet to understand, has an inner life and is therefore conscious. [p. 62] From this perspective, Gnostic teachings sound like spiritual mumbo-jumbo. But to the Gnostics, it is the notion that matter could somehow be the cause of conscious experience which is truly fantastic and incomprehensible. In The Gospel of Thomas, Jesus argues: ‘If the body came into being because of consiousness that is a wonder, but if consciousness came into being because of the body this is a wonder of wonders’. Science starts with the body and ends with Consciousness, moving from the outside inwards. The Gnostic approach starts with Consciousness and ends with the body, moving from the inside outwards. (p. 61-2)
The ultimate reality is spiritual or pneumatic. Matter is on the outskirts of existence and of creation. The center is the Spirit. Matter is just something for Spirit to experience and Spirit or Consciousness experiences matter via the psyche or soul. By this understanding, the body is in the soul, not, as we are usually led to believe, the other way around.
To explain their teachings, the Gnostics used the image of a circle. The circumference of the circle represents the physical body, which the ancients called physis, from which we get our word ‘physical’. This is our outer self.
The radius represents our psyche. This is traditionally translated as ‘soul’, although, as the ancient word ‘psyche’ has come into common usage since the advent of psychology, it is probably less misleading to leave the term untranslated. In relationship to the outer body, we experience the psyche/soul as our ‘inner self’. For the Gnostics, it is a deeper level of our identity than our body.
At the centre is our essential identity, which the ancients called pneuma or nous. Pneuma is usually translated ‘spirit’, but today this word has become all but meaningless. Nous is traditionally translated ‘intellect’, but this is misleading as we now associate the word ‘intellect’ purely [p. 61] with rational thought, whereas nous is the witness of all experiences whatever their quality. Plotinus describes nous as ‘a knowing principle’. It is that in us which knows. It is the sense of being in every human being. It is who we are. A more appropriate modern translation for both pneuma and nous is ‘Consciousness’. (pp.60-1)
Gnostics believe that when we are born, when we plunge into matter, we forget who we really are and where we came from. Like the Prodigal Son, we end up in the pigsty of matter in a “far country.”
As newborn babies we have no concept of who we are. We therefore come to conceptualize ourselves as who everyone says we are – the visible body. We identify how we appear to others, rather than how we are for ourselves. The Gnostics call our apparent identity the eidolon, which means ‘image’. The eidolon, like a reflection in a mirror, is who we appear to be, but not who we really are. In modern spiritual jargon the eidolon is the ‘ego’. In the Christian text Pistis Sophia, it is called the ‘counterfeit consciousness’. Basilides calls it the ‘parasitic psyche’. Plotinus calls it ‘the intruder’. Our word ‘idea’ – an image in the mind – comes from the same root as the word eidolon. The eidolon is the ‘I am the body’ idea. We have identified ourselves with this idea, rather than the Consiousness within which the idea arises. We have mistaken the image for the essence…This is the tragi-comedy of the human predicament. We are all God, but most of us think of ourselves as a somewhat shoddy person. (p. 67)
For Paul, people can be classified as to which part of the self they identify with. Hylics identify themselves with matter, psychics with the soul and pneumatics, or spirituals with the pneuma or Spirit, the Consciousness of the One:
The Gnostics divide human beings into categories according to their level of self-awareness. Paul, Valentinus and other Christians use the terms hylics, psychics, and pneumatics. Hylics, or ‘materialists’, identify themselves with the body – the circumference of the circle of self. Psychics, or ‘soulists’, identify with the psyche or soul – the radius. Pneumatics, or ‘spiritists’, are aware of themselves as spirit or Consciousness – the centre. (p. 68)
In Christian Gnosticism, Jesus represents the Consciousness at the center of the circle of the self and Sophia (the female figure of Wisdom) represents the psyche or soul, the radius, with one end of the line in the world of matter and the other connected with the Center. Thus in the Gospel of Thomas, a recently unearthed gospel that has layers older than the four gospels that the Literalists put in the New Testament, Jesus can say:
I will reveal to you what no eye can see,
What no ear can hear,
What no hand can touch,What cannot be conceived by the human mind.
What else could that be but Consciousness? (p. 63)
Gnostics of different traditions speak of another being, the Demiurge, a sort of subcreator (think of the Christof character in the film, The Truman Show). According to Freke and Gandy, the Demiurge represents the ego, which is “an eidolon or image of our true identity as Consciousness.” (p. 162) In the same way, the Demiurge is a poor reflection of Consciousness in this fallen world of matter, not the real thing. Futhermore, “The original Christians equate the Demiurge with Jehovah, portrayed by the Old Testament as jealous, angry, vindictive, self-obsesses – a perfect symbol for the ego. Hence modern Jungian psychologists have named the neurosis of egotistical self-inflation the ‘Jehovah Complex.’”(p. 162)
This has led Christian Gnostics to to claim that Jesus was not referring to the Old Testament Jehovah when he spoke of “the Father” who is, in this scheme, the One Consciousness out of which everything comes.
Why don’t Christians learn that in Sunday School? A long story, of course, but as we all know history is written by the winners and the Gnostics lost. The interesting thing is, though, that Gnostics were dominant in Christianity for the first two centuries of the Christian era:
The traditional history of Christianity is that Literalism took the world by storm, whilst Christian Gnosticism remained a minor heretical fringe movement. This is nonsense. Christian Literalism was initially a minor school of Christianity which developed in Rome towards the end of the second century. By this time Christian Gnosticism was an international movement which had spread throughout much of the Mediterranean, flourishing in such cosmopolitan cities as Alexandria, Edessa, Antioch, Epheseus and Rome. (p. 41)
If Literalist Christianity had a founder it would be Justin the Martyr in the mid-second century. He led a faction based in Rome that believed that the Father referred to by Jesus and Yahweh were the same, that Jesus fulfilled the Old Testament, that his life was predicted by the prophets and that Jesus really existed and his story really happened. This, according to Freke and Gandy, was a radical departure, since, for some Gnostics, it wasn’t necessary that Jesus was a real historical person, his life could be an allegory for spiritual seekers, like the leading figures in ancient mystery religions.
What resulted from the victory of Literalist Christianity, a victory that was sealed by the conversion of the Emperor Constantine, who selected Literalist leaders to form a unified Church by purging, often violently, any opponents, making it in time the official religion of the Roman Empire, was a religioun comforable with, and comforting of, power and hierarchy.Literalists did not claim Christain teachings to be radically different from Pagan philosophy… Literalist Christians claim that their myth of the dying and resurrecting Godman had recently been realized in real life. This is Literalist Christianity’s one claim to uniqueness, which is made by Augustine, the great spokesman for Christian Literalism. As someone who had been a follower of both the Pagan Gnostic Plotinus and the Christian Gnostic Mani before becoming a Catholic, Augustine knew there was nothing exceptional about Roman Christianity but this one incredible idea: ‘Christ came in the flesh’.
Christian Literalism was designed to dominate the West with an iron fist for nearly two millennia, but it began as an insignificant sect with a macabre enthusiasm for the end of the world. The Gnostic myth that Jesus would appear at the culmination of time was an allegory expressing the idea that when all souls were reunited with the Consciousness of God there would be a return to the primordial state of Oneness and the cosmic drama would be over. Literalists took this myth literally, developing the grotesque idea that Jesus was about to arrive to destroy the world, rescue a small group of Christian Literalists and condemn everyone else to eternal torment.”
…However, replacing the mythical sacrificed Godman with an historical martyr led to Christian Literalism becoming a sort of ‘suicide cult’ which, much to the horror of Gnostics, encouraged its members to imitate Jesus by also seeking out a sacrificial death. In the Literalist version of Christian history the Roman authorities are pictured as singling out Christians for terrible persecution. Actually they were often appalled at Christian Literalists’ eagerness to be martyred.
Literalism replaced the enlightened Gnostic sage at the centre of a small group of initiates with a hierarchy of bishops at the head of an expanding evangelical cult.
… From the large number of Christian scriptures in existence, Literalists selected four gospels to form the canon of the New Testament. These gospels were then declared to be the only authentic gospels and all of the other Christian scriptures were denounced as heretical. The four New Testament gospels are variations on the Jesus myth originally used by different schools of Christian Gnosticism. Putting them together created the illusion of there being four (albeit contradictory) eye-witness accounts of the same historical events. The later triumph of Literalism has left us with the distorted impression that these gospels were always the most popular Christian scriptures, but this is not true.
To endorse their authority, Literalist bishops fabricated a lineage connecting themselves back to the fictional disciples of the gospels. They turned Paul from the ‘Great Messenger’ of the Christian Gnostics into a bastion of Literalism by simply forging letters in his name which made him condemn their Gnostic rivals. It’s a simple trick, but it worked. It was not until the last few centuries that scholarship
became sophisticated enough to see through it. (pp. 38-40)
What about the “real” Jesus. Freke and Gandy say there wasn’t one. They say for the Gnostics there didn’t need to be. It seems to me more likely that there was one who taught something and around whom myths accreted, and, moreover, may have taught something that was deemed dangerous. Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes:
What seems to be true is that the writers of both the Old and New Testaments couldn't just toss out the oral traditions. They used them in a very special way. It often seems that whatever was positive was twisted and turned backward. With an awareness of how history can by mythicized and then historicized, and any combination thereof, we can look at the scriptures with a different eye. We can theorize that there must have been a real person around whom the legend of Jesus - the mythicized history - was wrapped. We can theorize that he was teaching something important and dramatic for it to have made such an impact. We can also theorize that this "impact" was seen as very dangerous at first, but later - after many twists and turns had been introduced, it was thought that it could be useful to utilize the growing myth as the centerpiece of a Control System. But, as we also suspect, the very nature of the Matrix itself and our current day observations, as well as a broad historical review, suggest that whatever "Jesus" was really doing and saying, it was most certainly twisted, corrupted, and emphases shifted in fairly predictable ways.Why, if in the schools of theology they are aware of the fact that, for example Paul didn’t write the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy and Titus) do preachers in the pulpit say he did. Why do they claim that the apostles “Luke” or “Matthew” or “John” actually wrote the Gospels when they know, at least in mainstream protestant faculties, that they didn’t, that they were written over a hundred years later? It does matter. Paul, for example, is thought by modern scholarship to have written Romans, Corinthians and others in his name. There are statements in the pastoral epistles that have had significant consequences down through the centuries, and consequences not at all positive. I will give one example now from Paul’s letter to Timothy that has caused incalculable pain and suffering: “Let all who are under the yoke of slavery regard their masters as worthy of all honor…” (1 Tim. 6:1). Or this from Titus, “train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be sensible, chaste, domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands…” (Titus 2:4-5) or, “Bid slaves to be submissive to their masters and to give satisfaction in every respect; they are not to be refactory, nor to pilfer, but to show entire and true fidelity, so that in everything they may adorn the doctrine of God our Savior.” (Titus 2:9-10). These passages have had serious social and political consequences down to this day. They have been trotted out to justify slavery, patriarchy and general submissiveness at every historical turn.
Burton Mack writes in Who Wrote the New Testament?
Women, for instance, would have to be subject to their husbands, be silent at church, dress modestly, and not wear their hair braided (1 Tim. 2:9-15)… Thus the author created a marvelous fiction in order to place a church manual of discipline from the mid-second century at the very beginning of the apostolic tradition. One wonders whether Paul would have been pleased by this honor. (p. 207)
Why would people in a position of authority pretend something is true when it isn’t? Of course, this happens all the time with people in political authority, but we expect more out of religious leaders, but should we? In fact, a lot of the lies inserted into the Bible were put there for political reasons. By the mid-second century, leaders of the type of church that would eventually win out, were concerned about “what the neighbors will think,” in other words, whether they would be seen as respectible citizens of the Roman Empire or not. Was there anything else besides radical egalitarianism and anti-authoritarianism that made early Christianity such a threat? Laura Knight-Jadczyk points out the following:
What is most revealing is the fact that the only writings contemporary to the times of early Christianity, which mention it specifically, remark that it was a "vile superstition." Yet, what we have as Christianity today is nothing more or less than the same religious practices of the peoples who branded it a "vile superstition." Tacitus tells us that in the time of Nero:
There followed a catastrophe, whether through accident or the design of the emperor is not sure, as there are authorities for both views, but it was the most disastrous and appalling of all the calamities brought on this city through the violence of fire. …a rumor had spread abroad that at the very time when the city was burning, Nero had mounted on his private stage and sung of the destruction of Troy, comparing the present disaster with that ancient catastrophe....
In order to put an end to these rumors Nero provided scapegoats and visited most fearful punishments on those popularly called Christians, a group hated because of their outrageous practices. The founder of this sect, Christus, was executed in the reign of Tiberius by the procurator Pontius Pilatus. Thus the pernicious superstition was suppressed for the while, but it broke out again not only in Judaea, where this evil had its origin, but even in Rome, to which all obnoxious and disgraceful elements flow from everywhere in the world and receive a large following.
The first ones to be seized were those who confessed; then on their information a vast multitude was convicted, not so much on the charge of incendiarism as because of their hatred of humanity. [Leon, Harry J., trans., "Selections from Tacitus" in MacKendrick, Paul and Herbert M. Howe, Classics in Translation, Vol. II: Latin Literature, C 1952 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press)]Pliny the Younger, who lived c. 62 to 113 AD, was sent by Emperor Trajan as a special representative to the Roman province of Bithynia in Asia Minor. His task was to keep the peace. When he had trouble dealing with Christians, Pliny wrote to the emperor asking how he should proceed against them describing what he knew about their religion:
However, they asserted that their guilt or mistake had amounted to no more than this, that they had been accustomed on a set day to gather before dawn and to chant in antiphonal form a hymn to Christ as if to a god, and to bind themselves by a pledge, not for the commission of any crime, but rather that they would not commit theft nor robbery nor adultery nor break their promises, nor refuse to return on demand any treasure that had been entrusted to their care; when this ceremony had been completed, they would go away, to reassemble later for a feast, but an ordinary and innocent one. They had abandoned even this custom after my edict in which, following your instruction, I had forbidden the existence of fellowships. So I thought it the more necessary to extract the truth even by torture from two maidservants who were called deaconesses. I found nothing save a vile superstition carried to an immoderate length.
The contagion of the superstition has pervaded not only the cities but the villages and country districts as well. Yet it seems that it can be halted and cured. It is well agreed that temples almost desolate have begun
to be thronged again, and stated rites that had long been abandoned are revived; and a sale is found for the fodder of sacrificial victims, though hitherto buyers were rare. So it is easy to conjecture what a great number of offenders may be reformed, if a chance to repent is given. [ Heironimus, John Paul, trans., "Selected Letters of the Younger Pliny," in MacKendrick, Paul and Herbert M. Howe, Classics in Translation, Vol. II.- Latin Literature, C) 1952 (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press)]So we have these clues:
1 Christians were hated because of their outrageous practices.2 Their beliefs were described as a pernicious superstition
3 The pernicious superstition had its origin in Judaea.
4 Christians were convicted, not because they were going around inflaming others, but because of their "hatred of humanity."
5 Pliny describes their practices as benign," but that the core belief was a "vile superstition carried to an immoderate length. "
6 This "vile superstition" was pervasive and apparently led to the temples and ancient rites including sacrifice, begin abandoned.
The question that comes to mind is: what would the peoples of that time have considered a "vile superstition" or "outrageous practices" when one is aware of what they considered normal religious practice which included dying god myths and gnosticism and sacrifice and all the other accoutrements of Christianity as we know it today? The only real clue we have is the remark: "not so much on the charge of incendiarism as because of their hatred of humanity - a vile superstition carried to an immoderate length."
Their what?
"Their hatred of humanity."
What would “hatred of humanity” possibly mean?
To be continued ...
posted by Donald Hunt at 9:08 PM
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